My #1 Feature Gets Small Update

We rolled out a few bug fixes this morning along with a small feature update to 'My #1'.

What's new:You can now remove your previously marked #1 stories using the 'Remove My #1' link under each saved story in your profile. We now also display which stories your friends currently have marked as #1 under your 'My Friends' tab.

Digg Adds New 'My #1 Story' Feature

Now you can showcase and separately store your favorite digg stories by using the new "My #1 Story" feature. Starting today, every time you digg a story an icon will appear next to the story title.

Clicking the icon will save and lock that story to the top of your digg user profile. This will let your friends know what you consider to be the most important story on digg at any given time. These #1 stories are also saved in a separate "My #1" archive that keeps a chronological record of all your previous favorites. Think of it as your bin for just your absolute favorite digg stories.

More on Digg Friends

Hi all -

I just wanted to post real quick to clarify a couple of points on my last blog entry on some of the changes we're making in the near future.

Last week there were several stories accusing some of our users of gaming digg by digging each others' stories. The intention of the post absolutely wasn’t to point a finger at any individual or group. It was intended to openly highlight some of the things we’re doing to keep digg as useful, democratic, and devoid of misuse as possible.

To set the record straight, we appreciate everything our long-established digg users have done to help build this community. There is nothing wrong with digging your friends' stories that you enjoy - in fact we encourage this activity through our friends features. It's our job at digg to ensure that stories are promoted based on a diverse pool of diggers (not just friends) - this is something we have tweaked in the past and will continue to tweak going forward.

Digg Friends

Over the last (almost) two years we have learned a lot about the user base and how to defend digg from spam, artificial diggs, and digg fraud. It's a battle we will continue to fight and one that we don't take lightly.

That said, today we read a couple blog posts that highlight users digging each others stories. This is something we encourage through our friends features and will continue to expand as digg evolves. It is our goal to create a platform in which you can share and promote news that is important to you. What is changing however is how we are handling story promotion. While we don't disclose exactly how story promotion works (to prevent gaming the system), I can say that a key update is coming soon. This algorithm update will look at the unique digging diversity of the individuals digging the story. Users that follow a gaming pattern will have less promotion weight. This doesn't mean that the story won't be promoted, it just means that a more diverse pool of individuals will be need to deem the story homepage-worthy.

Changes are coming to our top users page as well. In the near future you will see two tabs - 'Top Diggers' and 'Top Submitters'. Top diggers will be a ranked list of people that find/digg (not submit) stories that become popular. This list will also be sorted by how diverse the digger is - meaning if they digg stories from lots of different people and their stories become popular, they'll rank highly.

In the end digg is yours to control. No matter which stories are promoted, it's up to the masses to digg or bury them. If you see content you disagree with - bury it. If enough people do the same, the system will automatically remove the story.

Great news for digg!

Digg has reached the 500,000th registered user mark! We continue to grow at a phenomenal rate and we owe it to all 500,000+ of you for digging GREAT stories. As of 2:30pm PST digg has 511,136 registered users. We can't thank you enough, and we look forward to announcing our one millionth user registration sometime in the future.

Digg's Eli White Releases PHP Book

Congrats to digg developer Eli White for shipping his first book on PHP. The book is called 'PHP 5 in Practice'. Eli will also be giving several presentations on PHP development over the next few months:

Digg, trademarks, and confusion

A while ago our trademark attorney approached us and was concerned we could lose the name 'digg'. I had no idea this was possible as we had already filed for the trademark. Apparently if you don't enforce the TM (meaning not let other sites use it), we run the chance of losing it... which would suck. The last thing we want is to lose our name.

So what to do...

We don't want to shut anyone down (not even the clone sites), all we ask is that you avoid using the name 'digg' in your website names/domains. We're looking to see if we have any other options.